Apr 082009
Marriage of Figaro is, as I’ve said before, symmetrical. The other day I noticed another example of this: The city sequence is bookended by a train.
Remember, the episode is a Friday in the city, a Saturday in the ‘burbs.
Friday begins with Don on the train. He meets someone who knew him as Dick Whitman, Larry, who hands him a business card.
Friday ends with Don on the train. The conductor hands him a newspaper, and it exactly parallels the physical posture of Larry and the business card. Nothing else happens in that scene, it’s strictly there as a bookend.
And of course, season 1 is all about trains.
9 Responses to “Two Trains”
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I bet there are more. This stuff is too cool.
I don't know how Don could stand taking the train to the office every day. What trains must have stirred up for him: all those associations with death, loss, rebirth, escape. Near misses and second chances.
Even if his home-to-work commute went nowhere near where Dick's home used to be, I'd still have found it uncomfortable.
The car must be liberating for him, on many levels.
In season 1, I think it's the *train* that Don finds liberating. It's how he escaped the life of Dick Whitman–that train, bearing him away inexorably, and all he had to do was *not get off*.
"I have a life, and it only goes in one direction–forward." Just like a train. And exactly UNlike a carousel, which moves you "round and round, and back home again."
In a way, the mirrored trains of "Marriage of Figaro" prefigure Don's carousel revelation in the season finale. It demonstrates that despite what he wants to believe, his train *is* his carousel. It doesn't just take him forward forever — it takes him from home to work, work to home. Round and round and back again.
And just like the carousel, the train in "Marriage of Figaro" is also a time machine. At one end he sees a grown women haunted by a lonely childhood, for whom her dogs were her only comfort. And at the other end he sees the little girl he fears will become that woman, so he gives her what he thinks she'll need to survive that fate–her own dog.
Dev, good stuff!
Dev, I agree with Deb, I love your points! That last paragraph, especially.
I never looked at it that way but poor Betty. Even Don's most inscrutable (to her) actions, like bringing home a huge dog without discussing it with her, relate to the other women in his life and not his life with her.
If season 1 was all about trains, is season 2 all about planes? American Airlines, The Jet Set, the Missile crisis (which I know is always talked about as being about rockets, but I always remember the Dr. Strangelove plane sequences too.) I don't know if they were actually capable of launching an unmanned rocket across the world then (No, really! I am not a rocket scientist! Swear to god!). Don always seems to see rockets as a herald of a horrible, annihilating future ("Some people think of the future and it upsets them. They see a rocket and they start building bomb shelters… I don't think it's ridiculous to assume that we're looking for other planets because this one will end.").
So it seems to me planes are Don's new, modern way of making like a hobo and ride the rails with the city fading behind him, trains might be his old escape route that has become a carousel of work-to-home hell (hence the need for a new mode of transport) and he'd rather not think about rockets at all, since they not only symbolize literal annihilation, but also the heralding of a new era; the destruction of the world and the rules he has worked so hard to master.
Interesting thoughts about air travel and Season 2. We'd also identified quite awhile back (we, Basketcases in general–I don't remember who) that S2 seemed to be about cars. Bobbie in the car, the car accident, Father Gil had a car, Don bought a new car, used to sell cars, and was talking to those car dudes in California.
Definitely not about trains, though.
It was B. Cooper who said S2 was about cars.
It's also a matter of income and stature. Middle class folks take the train. Upper-middle class folks drive in to the city. Wealthy people fly. As Don as moved up from the train (creative director) to his Cadillac (partner) to flying across country (philanthropic board member), his influence within SC has risen, as well.